Ten Dollars an Hour for the Madman Heir

The house sat at the end of a private road I was not supposed to know existed, behind an iron gate that opened when I gave a name that was not my own. I gave it anyway, because the woman on the phone had told me to, and because the ten dollars an hour was the only number I could afford to refuse and could not. Alder Bay was a small town that liked to pretend it was a city, and the Calloway family had spent a hundred years making sure everyone forgot it was not. The estate sat above the water on the north bluff, all gray stone and cold glass, and when I stepped out of my car the wind off the bay cut through my coat like it had been waiting for me. A housekeeper met me at the door. Her name was Mrs. Pruitt and she looked at me the way you look at furniture that has been delivered to the wrong address. She took my coat, told me the family did not tolerate lateness, and led me through rooms that smelled of lemon polish and old money. I counted three sitting rooms before I stopped counting. The portraits on the walls all had the same jaw, the same careful eyes, the same look of people who had never once been told no. "You understand the arrangement," Mrs. Pruitt said. It was not a question. "I sit with him," I said. "Four nights a week. Eight to midnight." "You sit with him," she repeated. "You do not speak to him unless he speaks to you. You do not touch him. You do not take photographs. You do not discuss what you see in this house with anyone. If he becomes agitated, you press the button by the door and you leave the room. Someone else handles the rest." "And the pay," I said. "Ten dollars an hour. Paid weekly, cash. There is no negotiation." The number was insulting. A night nurse in Alder Bay made thirty-five. A dog walker made twenty. But the woman who called me had known exactly what she was offering and exactly why I would take it, and that was the part I could not forgive, even then. "Where is he?" I asked. She led me up a staircase that curved like the inside of a shell and down a hallway with doors on both sides, every one of them closed. At the last door she stopped and turned to face me. "The family has tried eleven people in fourteen months," she said. "He does not want any of them. He will not want you. Do not take it personally." "What happened to him?" Her face did not move. "You are not paid for that question." She opened the door. The room was large and dim, with one lamp burning on a table near the window and the curtains drawn against the water. There was a bed in the corner that had not been made, a chair that had been knocked over and never set upright, and a man standing with his back to me at the window, looking at a reflection he could not have seen through the glass. He was tall and thin in a way that made me think of something starved, his shirt untucked, one sleeve dark at the cuff with something I did not want to look at too closely. His hair was black and too long and needed washing. His shoulders were up around his ears like he was bracing against a cold that was not in the room. Mrs. Pruitt said his name. He did not turn. "Hollis," she said again. "This is the new one." Then she left, and the door closed behind her, and I was alone in a room with a man who had made eleven people quit and had not yet acknowledged that I existed. I stood by the door for a long time. The lamp hummed. Somewhere below us a clock ticked through the floor. He did not move and did not speak, and I began to wonder if the whole job was just this, standing in a dim room watching the back of a stranger, and whether that would be easier or harder than what I had done before. After twenty minutes I sat down on the floor, because my legs were tired and because there was no chair upright to take, and I said nothing, because I was not paid to speak first. At eleven forty he turned around. I had not expected his face to be young. The stories I had heard in town, the ones people told in low voices at the diner counter, had made him sound like a monster, or a ghost, or something worse than either. He was neither. He was a man in his late twenties with a jaw that could have come off one of the portraits downstairs and eyes that were doing something I had never seen eyes do before. They were not empty. They were working, turning me over, taking me apart, looking for the seam. He looked at me the way a man looks at a lock he has already decided to pick. "You're not a nurse," he said. His voice was low and rough, like he had not used it in days. "No," I said. "You're not from the agency." "No." He came away from the window and crossed the room, and I stayed where I was on the floor, because standing up felt like losing something I had not yet decided to give. He stopped a few feet away and looked down at me. "What are you?" he asked. "An aide," I said. "Eight to midnight. Four nights a week." "That's what they told you to say." "That's what I am." He crouched down so his face was level with mine, and I saw then that his pupils were wide and his hands were not entirely steady, and that whatever was wrong with him was chemical and also something else, something underneath, something the chemicals had been poured over to hide. "Thérèse," he said. The name went through me like cold water. It was my sister's name. It was the name on the papers I had signed in a lawyer's office six months ago, the name I had taken because I did not know what else to do with what was left of her. Nobody in Alder Bay knew it. Nobody in this house should have known it. "That's not my name," I said. "It's the name on the contract," he said. "I read it. I read everything they bring into this house." He tilted his head. "But it's not yours, is it. It was somebody's, and now it's a costume you wear, and you're wondering how I knew." I did not answer. My heart was hitting the inside of my ribs like it wanted out. "You want to know what I am," he said. "I'll tell you. I'm the aspirin." "The what?" "Everybody in this family has a headache," he said, "and I'm the pill they swallow so it goes away. That's all I am to them. That's all I've ever been. And you're the next pill they're trying to feed me, except you're not. You're something else." He stood up. "Come back tomorrow." "Are you dismissing me?" "I'm telling you to come back," he said, and turned away, and went back to the window, and that was the end of it. I drove home through the dark with my hands tight on the wheel. The house behind me was a black shape against a blacker sky, and the water below the bluff was a sound I could hear all the way down the road. I told myself I would not go back. Ten dollars an hour was not worth it. The name was a coincidence. He was a sick man in a rich man's house and I was a woman who needed money and there was nothing in that room that had anything to do with me or with Thérèse. I went back the next night.